Rudy Rucker's Blog, page 57

Flurb #10

Well, we made it to Flurb #10, the Fall-Winter, 2010 issue!

Flurb is a free online Webzine of Astonishing Tales, edited and published by Rudy twice a year. The previous issue, of Spring-Summer, 2010, has garnerned seventy-two thousand unique visits so far.

I'm in awe of the writers who keep helping to make Flurb happen. This huge new issue—with seventeen stories—makes me think of classic anthos like Dangerous Visions, Mirrorshades, or Semiotext(e) SF.

Dig in! Click on the cover below, look at ...

Train to Kadrey's in SF

I rode the CalTrain commuter train up to San Francisco alone, with bicycle, there to cycle over to Richard Kadrey's house for a pot-luck afternoon party thrown by him and his wife Nicola Ginzler.

Lately the achievements I strive and scheme towards haven't felt so rewarding. Sometimes I begin to wonder why I get so worked up about my little events, my small victories, my incessant machinations for fame. Sometimes I wish I could stop trying to accomplish something and frikkin' relax. So…I...

Nude Nabs UFO

I finished my painting today, "Nude Nabs UFO". You can click on the image below to see a larger version.

I started this one last week during an en plein air painting session on a pocket beach near Davenport with my painter pal Vernon Head. I had the rocks and the water, and I added the UFO, modeling its shape on the lid of my water bottle. And at home I put in the two nudes, to liven things up.

The scale of the flying saucer didn't look quite right, and it wasn unclear how far away it...

Beach Saucer, San Jose Jazz Fest

[Relatively cheerful street preacher at the Jazz Fest in San Jose.:]

This week for whatever reason I've been listening to Al Jourgensen and Ministry's 1991 song "Jesus Built my Hotrod". The audio "Red Line/White Line? is the longest, but the video version is quite substantial. The sound of a passing race car is in some ways like a industrial-metal riff. The vocals are performed by Gibby Haynes of the Butthole Surfers. "Where you're goin' don't matter because it weren't never there."

I'm...

Podcast of Borderlands Talk

I had a friendly crowd at the Borderlands reading on Saturday, and we sold some books and prints. Thanks to Jude Feldman for organizing it.

I talked a bit about the origins of the Ware Tetralogy, read the brain-eating scene from Software, a cheeseball vs. moldie scene from Freeware, and a juggling moldies scene from Realware. And then we had some Q & A. To hear the talk, click the button below to go to my podcast station.

It was nice to spend the day in SF. We hit one of my favorite...

Reading at Borderlands in SF, Saturday 3 p.m.

I'll be reading from The Ware Tetralogy on Saturday, August 14th at 3:00 pm at Borderlands books in San Francisco.

The store is at 866 Valencia Street, see directions here.

We'll also be selling some of my older books, and my art book Better Worlds, and some high-quality prints of my paintings.

Hope to see some you there!

Beach Saucer, Bruce Wagner, Stories

A read a several year's old book by Bruce Wagner last week, Still Holding, and I just got The Chrysanthemum Palaceout of the library. I kind of like Wagner, he writes these very dark and hip stories about Hollywood characters. He's a master of California dialect. And now and then he unleashes these really poetic streaks.

This said, you need to be careful to to read a Bruce Wagner book while eating a meal—I do often read while eating lunch, and several times the Wag-Man spiked my appetite w...

Beach Saucer 1

A read a several year's old book by Bruce Wagner last week, Still Holding, and I just got Chrysanthemum out of the library. I kind of like Wagner, he writes these very dark and hip stories about Hollywood characters.

This said, you need to be careful to to read a Bruce Wagner book while eating a meal—I do often read while eating lunch, and several times the Wag-Man spiked my appetite with some truly gross scene. "Rude Chuckles with a Negative Charge," as Robert Williams wrote as motto on...

PW Reviews The Ware Tetralogy

Publishers Weekly came out with a great review of The Ware Tetralogy today.

Rudy Rucker, The Ware Tetralogy. Prime Books, $24.95 (752p).
Rucker's four Ware novels—Software (1982), Wetware (1988), Freeware (1997), and Realware (2000)—form an extraordinary cyberweird future history with the heft of an epic fantasy novel and the speed of a quantum processor. Still exuberantly fresh despite their age, they primarily follow two characters (and their descendants): Cobb Anderson, who instigated the...

New Painting: "The Riviera"

I finished a new painting today, "The Riviera." I was going for a kind of French Impressionist look with this one, thinking of a garden party. Another inspiration was that I'd recently seen the Mel Brooks theater production of Young Frankenstein. But I went for a robot or mechanical man rather than a Frankenstein's monster. I like how he's glowing from the inside. In a way, this painting is an image of my wife Sylvia and me, on a trip we took the Riviera with her brother Henry, in 1966...